For looking at old things in new ways. For writing, doodling, taking pictures.

Getting around to that giant personal project. (Yes, that one.)

Meaning to and wanting to. But not. Getting to.

So how do you make nourishing the intellect a priority?

DK is excited to share what we know now, after 20 years of looking for the answer to that very question.

It’s called S. P. A. C. E., and it’s an eZine designed for people who love art, architecture, philosophy and music. To meet. To commingle. To share, in n:n virtual space.

What this is and isn’t

THIS ISN’T A COPY OF designboom, or design sponge, or apartment therapy, or any of those blogs. Used to want to write for Metropolis. Used to want to, but got a job at a trade paper for the A&E industry, instead. Met gobs of people. People doing cool things in landscape architecture, green design, conservation, envelope design, and efficiency, and much, much more. Read books. Ate them, really.

So it’s not those things, but then, what is it? S. P. A. C. E. is a cross-disciplinary eZine.

Art. Architecture. Design. Philosophy. And music (much of it is jazz, admittedly).

S. P. A. C. E. is a place for a small circle of people to have a conversation in a virtual space. Never more than 50 members at a time.

An “open space,” but not in real life since the idea is to connect us all across the world and disciplines, too. But not too many at a time. There are no ads. There are no corporate sponsors or flashing sidebars or subliminal messages. Not saying that those other blogs do that, or anything. It’s just that, DK wants more conversation. More connection, in real time, even if that’s asychronous, it’s nice to have a few people in a circle talking together about things that inspire all of us. But how do you find that online these days? Quora? Too big, too trolled. The big architecture magazines? Too commercially influenced, too heavy on the PR-budget folks getting the biggest splashiest pages. Then, where? Facebook? Oh, no, must it be there? Society of the Spectacle author Guy de Bord would cry.

So would DK.

We did.

Which was why it started to happen. The small circle conversation-making.

This began in early 2014, with a project called “the cojournal.”

People who’d never met in real life began a year’s worth of writing together to small prompts. Through e-mail. In time, because of progression and the ambient intimacy that comes when we simply talk together (and listen!), there began to be breakthroughs. Uncertainty —> Wading through a bunch of random stuff —> The “a-ha.”

Looks familiar, right?

This is the very stuff of The Creative Process.

Which Design Kompany talked about for 10 years in Seattle and elsewhere. Getting to the heart of the great concept started with brilliant dialogue. Which could only happen if there were 7 things. (Which DK shares in the first issue of S. P. A. C. E., an eZine launched in January.)

Excited to be able to tell all of this to you, now.

Excited to be able to reduce the massive blog that was here before into one simple page that is all about S. P. A. C. E.

Let’s meet in S. P. A. C. E.?

There will be many references, but here is the big one. Open Space Technology. All events and real-life engagements, plus the conversations that we used to host with clients, are inspired by the idea that you only go where you want to go and listen to what you care about so that you don’t waste any time doing stuff that’s dumb. Here’s how it looks in practice: Open Space Technology at Wikipedia >

Design Kompany is adapting the Open Space method to bring more space to more people in a virtual space. People who care about making, doing, sharing.